From Entrepreneur to Artist: Visceral Work from Andrew Max Modlin – Genie Davis
Andrew Max Modlin has made quite a journey from visionary entrepreneurship to full-time artist. His road may have been a bit circuitous, but he’s made a return to his first passion.
“Design, branding, and cannabis took up around 15 years of my life, so when I was in- between projects for the first time during COVID, I decided I was going to give myself a one-year break to see what I wanted to do next. The fact that I wasn’t painting haunted me all those years because I always felt like that was my life calling,” he explains. “While I got to hone my design skills, painting was the skill that I had developed and practiced up until I went into business, and now that skill, partially, was being wasted.”
After moving to Amsterdam, he developed the technique of drawing digitally on his iPad, and shortly thereafter decided to paint in the same style as his drawings. His studio work upon his return to Los Angeles has “focused on how I could translate my digital sketches to the canvas.”
With art once again Modlin’s calling, he works in vivid color that evokes places he has seen and been. “I like to think about a place’s palette while I’m in it. Each location has its own unique set of colors shaped by the season, the light, and the energy of the place itself. I’m always thinking about how I can interact with those colors through something familiar, like a landscape,” he relates, “If you paint a tree green, no one thinks twice. But paint it pink, and suddenly people are interested.”
Widely traveled, Modlin views Amsterdam as a future home, but among other locales, he loves Thailand and the uniqueness of Tibet. About the latter location, he notes “It’s fascinating to experience a place that hasn’t been fully westernized, and just getting there and around is its own kind of adventure.”
Describing his work as “extremely tactile,” he notes that while his subjects are rooted in place, “It’s more about the paint and the act of painting itself than the subject matter. While I do aim to arrange shapes in a way that feels balanced or compelling, the real interest lies in the paint: the texture, the layers, the movement.”
Currently residing and painting in West Hollywood, Modlin is opening a pop-up solo exhibition, Through the Brush, next Saturday, June 7th. Curated by Peter Frank, the show presents Modlin’s large-scale paintings and dreamlike landscapes depicting a wide range of locations from his travels to Iceland, Hawaii, Punta Mita, and Amsterdam.
He describes his work here as “a convergence…this work feels like it unlocks everything I’ve been building toward over the last 30 years. When I was first making art during and right after school it was all about color and layering. Then I spent over a decade focused on graphic design and architecture. These paintings feel like a full-circle moment, combining all that experience into something cohesive and personal.”
Modlin reveals that while his work leads through a variety of terrains, the images are “a dialogue between hand, surface, and time. I weave in fragments of my past life in design to make graphic forms, grids, and sharp contrasts only to disrupt them with unruly textures, neon pulses, and gestural mark making.”
Intimate and alive, the wildly beautiful and evocative work is a plunge into the unknown beauty of memory and place, of location and love for the natural world. It’s a look into soul of place and most of all the place of personal longing within, as well as a way for the artist to explore his own relationship to art and the world itself.
“Through the Brush” opens at 411 N. La Cienega in West Hollywood, running June 7-21, with artist’s reception June 7th, 4-9 p.m. The show will be open Wednesday-Saturday noon to 5 through the 21st, when a closing reception will be held from 4-9 p.m.
- Genie Davis; images provided by the artist
